Authoritarian Political Economy
How Authoritarian Propaganda Adapts to Backlash: Evidence from China
When propaganda encounters backlash from the public, how does the authoritarian regime adapt its propaganda strategies?
While a substantial body of research has highlighted the effectiveness of authoritarian pro- paganda in shaping the information landscape and swaying public opinion (Huang, 2015; Weiss and Dafoe, 2019; Carter and Carter, 2021; Mattingly and Yao, 2022; Pan et al., 2022; Rozenas and Stukal, 2019) and limitations (Huang, 2018; Liao and Hwang, 2022; Potter and Wang, 2022), how the authoritarian propaganda adapts to backlashes have been understudied.
We collected propaganda data from street-level bureaucracy WeChat accounts, correlating over 90000 posts with over 5000 citizen petitions from February to May, both by date and street.
We used Structural Topic Modeling (STM) and BERTopic to detect if the petitions and propaganda posts are related.
We used the similarity score based on the Sentence Transformer to capture the dynamics of propaganda.
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